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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#501

Post by theGnuMe »

tootie wrote: post #244
amazingamazing wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.

I think that's generous. He is chopping entire departments after scooping up all their data. He doesn't seem to be doing any analysis at all. And a lot of his public statements have been patently false.

So an endgame is grok runs the government.

I’d be worried about real spies gaining access in person given the confusion of who is doge or not.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#502

Post by lmm »

firstlunchables wrote: post #421
amazingamazing wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.

Touting “first principals” is a way of revealing “I’m too dumb to understand other people’s work.” Like if you can’t understand higher level concepts and have to start on your own from Euclid, it just means you aren’t very smart but think you can be another Maxwell just by thinkin’ real hard. It’s a joke.

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Physics has to work, organisational processes don't - Maxwell himself wouldn't have been able to understand the travel expense rules at some organisations I've seen, and the right response isn't always to try to reverse engineer what people were thinking when they came up with this crap, sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#503

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #385
9283409232 wrote: post #106

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

> The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors. But nobody t…

You're just regurgitating conspiracy theories and political nonsense from the right.

For example: '$8m to the supposedly independent "Politico"' is for subscriptions. So what? The rest is the same sort of nonsense: innuendo, smears and outright lies.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#504

Post by micromacrofoot »

b8 wrote: post #461

Many former hackers have been hired by the government with TS clearances and it's ridiculous to compare teenage hacker groups to violent street gangs. I told an agency of previous hacking stuff and they were more concerned with me admitting to cheating on a math test at college lol.

yeah they're vetted, get clearance, and are on a short leash... none of that seems to apply here

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#505

Post by zeroCalories »

belorn wrote: post #114

It has been a fairly common story, and part rumor, that intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the cyber criminal scene, and that the IT security industry also adapted this approach. They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities. When I studied IT security in university, about 1…

Don't know about intellegence agencies but I got to know pentesters / red teamers at some large companiese, and they were cool but had a very unsavory side. Several times I found myself in conversations where they were admiting to serious crimes and unethical behavior. I suspect that you need to be passionate about wanting to do bad things if you want to be good at security.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#506

Post by ty6853 »

jisnsm wrote: post #107
ty6853 wrote: post #38

A career fed guy in his 50s being forced to beg for his job in a 15 minute teleconference to an arrogant zoomer in shorts and an unbuttoned suit is peak representation of democracy.

As a southern European, I’m really envious.

Have you watched the final moments of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#508

Post by donmcronald »

mijamo wrote: post #396
swat535 wrote: post #356

I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here: 1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits 2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a hu…

There are way more possibilities. And the main one is that any negative effect would only be visible in a long time (let's say 10 years) and by that time it may take 10-20 years again to change course. For instance say you lower standards for building bridges, how do you assess the success? First you may notice nothing, because all bridges under construction stay with their design, so consequence 0. After a few years…

The timeline for some things is way longer than 10-20 years and, in cases like data collection, we simply lose out forever.

What we're seeing right now, and it's not just the US, are policies that risk depriving future generations of data that may be critical to solving problems 50 or 100 years from now. If you say that collecting water quality data is a waste of money because we don't have problems with water quality, that's a permanent decision that can't be reversed and will adversely affect future researchers. It's incredibly frustrating.

In the bridge example above, even with bridges failing after 30 years, the average person won't be able to assess whether or not it was a success or a failure. You'd have to know the cost of initial construction, lifetime maintenance costs, replacement cost, the value gained from short term savings, etc.. Coming up with a calculation to categorize it as a success or failure could be difficult if everyone is acting in good faith. Throw in politics, partisan interests, propaganda, etc. and it seems almost impossible.

No matter what side people fall on politically, everyone should consider unbiased, non-partisan data collection a vital government service. If you disagree on how the data should be collected, do it both ways and debate the merits as long as you want. Just make sure the data stays available.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#509

Post by archagon »

jslezak wrote: post #39
camillomiller wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Their next move - and the Rubicon none of us can uncross - will be defying the court orders that are inevitably issued to stop the flagrant criminality Once they defy those, it’s done. The enforcement of federal laws including court orders requires the Trump justice department to act. And his first moves (naturally) were to fire all oversight people, install extremist hardcore loyalists at the top, and fire anyone un…

And Vance is already saying they should ignore the judges: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance...

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#510

Post by I_am_tiberius »

I find it shockingly absurd how the All-In podcast hosts blindly support everything one of their own does. It’s obvious they treat Musk like a god. In the latest episode, they even made fun of concerns about privacy, claiming that all people care about is the state not wasting money. - completely dismissing worries about data exposure.
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